Baths and Persecution

One of the interesting places that I found while I was walking around near the station was the Via delle Terme di Diocleziano or the Road of Diocletian's Baths.  The road ends up in a little roundabout with a fountain in the middle.  One side of the circle was a really large, fancy white building with stores in the bottom.  But the other side of the circle was a very, very old building made out of red bricks that were crumbling into pieces, they were so old.

This is just a tiny part of the Diocletian baths.  Diocletian was a 3rd century AD Roman emperor.  (Who was kind of a scary looking fellow.)  He is known for a few things.  First, for his political innovations and reforms, which strengthened the empire significantly.  One big change that he made was setting up co-emperors, and then co-caesars, so that Rome was ruled by a tetrarchy, or a government by four people.  This made succession much smoother and allowed him to resign from office instead of being assassinated.  Second, he is known for instigating an extremely vicious persecution of Christians.  John Foxe, in his Foxe's Book of Martyrs, records the Diocletian persecutions as the the 10th persecution and includes a bunch of really unpleasant stories about the kinds of things that happened, including pictures.  I've copied that section of the book (which is in the public domain) and posted it as its own post, in case you want to read it.  It is a bit gruesome but it might be a good history lesson?  Interestingly enough, Diocletian was the emperor right before Constantine, who made Christianity legal in the Roman Empire.

Third, Diocletian really, really like his baths.  The Diocletian Baths were the largest baths in Rome but the buildings also included libraries and other important official meeting places (it wasn't just a place to bathe).
This website (which looks like it is someone's school project) looks like it has some interesting information about the baths.  As near as I can tell (from estimating from different sources, it looks like the whole Baths compound is about 1,500 x 1,200 feet.  That is five football fields by four football fields!  The Baths were built by Christian slaves and, at least according to some sources I found, the slaves marked crosses on some of the bricks and you can still see them, if you know were to look.  That was one of the reasons why there are now at least two churches in the building.

The little bit of the old Baths wall that I saw from the street is part of what is now the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri (the Basilica (which is a kind of church) of St. Mary of the Angels and Martyrs). 

If you go here, you can see the English language version of the church website.  It has a lot of pictures of the church interior, as well as panoramas of some of the halls.  If you click on the "Guided Tour" button, and then choose a room or area, you can see pictures of the rooms and the history of the room and paintings.  If you go here, you can see the Italian website.  The first picture down is a video tour of the church.  Unfortunately, the descriptions are all in Italian, but it is still a very pretty church.  The whole Baths complex is now a national museum.

On interesting and very relevant tidbit is that after he retired from being Emperor, he moved to the Dalmatian coast.  He actually lived in what is now Croatia, (a very beautiful part of the coast, too!) but the Dalmatian region was actually very broad and included what is now Albania.  And, just a few hours after I stopped at Diocletian's Baths, I headed to Albania!